The job loss that led to a Pulitzer win

Edward P. Jones, who hammered away at his debut novel after being laid off from his job two years ago, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction yesterday for that book.

The Known World (Amistad/HarperCollins) - Jones's first book after a short-story collection 10 years ago - is the story of a black slave owner in antebellum Virginia. The novel, which made Jones a literary sensation, also won the National Book Critics Circle's award for fiction.

Jones, 53, whose single mother couldn't read or write, said: "You write a book, you send it off and you hope that someone will publish it. People giving you prizes for it? That's a different thing altogether ... with my first book, when a publisher said yes, I thought I had used up all my luck. I didn't get a huge advance. I'm no Stephen King."

Columbia University announced several other winners in the Letters & Drama category, each of whom will receive $10,000. The poetry prize was awarded to Franz Wright for Walking to Martha's Vineyard. Wright's father, the critically acclaimed poet James Wright, who died in 1980, also won a Pulitzer for poetry. Other winners included biographer William Taubman and non-fiction writer Anne Applebaum.

In New York, Doug Wright, 41, was directing a play reading when he got the "monumental news" that he had received the drama prize for I Am My Own Wife. The one-actor play is based on the life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a German transvestite who survived World War II and communist East Germany.

Wright credited his collaborators, including director Moises Kaufman and actor Jefferson Mays, saying the play "was born of a collective".

Taubman, 62, won for his biography, Krushchev: The Man and His Era.

"I wore myself out writing this book," said Taubman, who worked on the book for 20 years and teaches at Amherst College in Massachusetts. "I'm an academic ... All my life I've hoped ... to write something that gains the respect of both academics and general readers."